@theclick

Q&A: Fred Ritchin on AI and the threat to photojournalism no one is talking about – Columbia Journalism Review

Q&A: Fred Ritchin on AI and the threat to photojournalism no one is talking about
In recent years, artificial intelligence engineers have used millions of real photographs—taken by journalists all over the world, and without those journalists’ permission—to train new imaging software to create synthetic photojournalism. Now anyone can prompt AI software like OpenAI’s DALL-E to generate convincing images of people or places that never existed, and of events that […]
via Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/fred_ritchin_ai_photojournalism.php
The other thing to add to the puzzle is, if you start making millions of synthetic images, then the new AI will be training on those images as well. The concept of history will become more and more distorted, because they’ll be training on the images that are not made by cameras, but made according to the way people want to see the world. What happens if people have five million images of World War II according to the way they want the war to look, and they look like photographs, so that’s what the AI is going to be training on in the future?

March 2, 2023

Ethics
Memphis, Through the Lens of Tyre Nichols – The New York Times

Memphis, Through the Lens of Tyre Nichols
His photos, which he wrote were meant to “bring my viewers deep into what I am seeing,” reveal parts of the city some residents say they had forgotten.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/us/tyre-memphis-photos.html
“It brings a lot of peace and solace just to sit with the crew and talk about him and laugh,” he said. “It’s almost like he’s not even gone. It’s like he’s just not here today.”

March 2, 2023

Portfolios & Galleries

Tyre Nichols
The Life and Death of a Ukrainian Photographer | The New Yorker

The Life and Death of a Ukrainian Photographer
Maksym Levin started documenting war “to become famous.” After seeing conflict up close, his motivations shifted.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-life-and-death-of-a-ukrainian-photographer
According to an investigation by Reporters Without Borders, the men were “undoubtedly executed in cold blood, possibly after being tortured.” At the site of the killing, the Russians shared a meal, leaving behind packaging from their food rations, plastic spoons, cigarette packs, and instructions for firing rockets. Levin’s cell phone, helmet, flak jacket, and shoes were never found.

February 27, 2023

War

Maksim Levin
New York Times Photographers in Ukraine on the Images They Can’t Forget – The New York Times

Our Photographers in Ukraine on the Images They Can’t Forget
In a year of war, New York Times photographers have reported from the front line, from cities and villages and in the footsteps of refugees. These pictures stayed with them.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/24/world/europe/ukraine-war-anniversary-photos.html
Here, instead, 14 photographers who have worked in Ukraine for The Times each answer the same two questions: What image has stayed with you from your coverage of the first year of the war, and why?

February 24, 2023

War

Brendan Hoffman, Daniel Berehulak, David Guttenfelder, Diego Ibarra Sánchez, Emile Ducke, Finbarr O’Reilly, Ivor Prickett, Jim Huylebroek, Laura Boushnak, Lynsey Addario, Mauricio Lima, Nicole Tung, Tyler Hicks
A Big-Wave Photographer Faces Frigid Water, Sharks and Currents to Get the Shot – The New York Times

A Big-Wave Photographer Faces Frigid Water, Sharks and Currents to Get the Shot
Sachi Cunningham is one of the few photographers who shoots surfers at Mavericks while swimming. “You don’t want to get the same shots as everyone else on the boat,” she said.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/sports/big-wave-surfing-sachi-cunningham.html
Sachi Cunningham is one of the few photographers who shoots surfers at Mavericks while swimming. “You don’t want to get the same shots as everyone else on the boat,” she said.

February 21, 2023

Interviews

Sachi Cunningham
Photographs That Show the Whimsy and Eros of Ukraine before the War

Photographs That Show the Whimsy and Eros of Ukraine before the War
In images made before the Russian invasion in 2022, three photographers preserve social memory—and witness a nation striving to define its sovereignty.
via Aperture: https://aperture.org/editorial/the-photographers-who-showed-the-whimsy-and-eros-of-ukraine-before-the-war/
Working in black and white with one camera, Chekmenev took the official passport-format headshots of weary visages against a portable white backdrop; while using a wide-angle camera with color film, he captured all that lay beyond in photographs that would eventually form the series Passport (1995). “I saw that the frame needed to be widened,” he told me recently. The photographs represent a people entrenched in an old Soviet system that cared little for, deceived, and effectively abandoned the individual. Depicting a generation trapped in time, the pictures teeter on the precipice of uncertainty.

February 18, 2023

Portfolios & Galleries

Alexander Chekmenev, Julie Poly, Justyna Mielnikiewicz
Ming Smith’s Poetic Blur Is on Display in MoMA Photographs – The New York Times

Ming Smith’s Poetic Blur
This streetlight mystic shows her painterly photography at MoMA in an archive that celebrates long exposures and perceptual improvisation.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/arts/design/ming-smith-photographer-museum-of-modern-art.html
The stellar photographer Ming Smith remembers walking past the Museum of Modern Art when she was in her early 20s and telling herself, “I’m going to be in that museum one day.”

February 17, 2023

Photography

Ming Smith
How America’s Most Cherished Photographer Learned to See | The New Yorker

How America’s Most Cherished Photographer Learned to See
For five decades, Stephen Shore has remade our vision of the country, largely by remaking his own.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/how-americas-most-cherished-photographer-learned-to-see
I think it’s important that you distill this into three aspects. The first aspect is physical. It’s what the eyes do. The second aspect is cognitive. It is apprehending the image from the eyes. The third aspect is metacognitive. It is being aware of apprehending what one sees. It’s this last that’s of particular interest to me as a photographer. It’s been my experience that, when a photographer takes pictures when they’re seeing in a state of heightened awareness, they make subtle decisions that lead the resultant image to appear particularly vivid.

February 17, 2023

Interviews

Stephen Shore
Julian Wasser, the ‘Photographer Laureate’ of L.A., Dies at 89 – The New York Times

Julian Wasser, the ‘Photographer Laureate’ of L.A., Dies at 89
In the 1960s and ’70s, he created indelible images of the city’s combustible mix of art, rock ’n’ roll, new Hollywood and social ferment.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/arts/julian-wasser-dead.html
Julian Wasser, the artful and rakish photojournalist who chronicled the celebrity culture of Los Angeles that began percolating in the 1960s — a heady, sexy and often combustible brew of new Hollywood, art and rock ’n’ roll — as well as the city’s darker moments, creating some of the most indelible images of that era, died on Feb. 8 in Los Angeles. He was 89.

February 15, 2023

Obituaries

Julian Wasser
Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion in the US for copyright infringement – The Verge

Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion in the US for copyright infringement
Getty says Stability AI stole 12 million images without permission
via The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-lawsuit-getty-images-stable-diffusion
Getty Images has filed a case against Stability AI, alleging that the company copied 12 million images to train its AI model ‘without permission … or compensation.’

February 10, 2023

Copyright, Software & Technology
Obituary: Former Spec photographer Paul Hourigan was ‘an old-school photojournalist’ | TheSpec.com

Obituary: Former Spec photographer Paul Hourigan was ‘an old-school photojournalist’
Known for getting that special shot at news events like fires and crashes
via thespec.com: https://www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/2023/02/06/obituary-former-spec-photographer-paul-hourigan-was-an-old-school-photojournalist.html
Spec photographer Barry Gray called Hourigan “an old-school photojournalist” whose “first love, and best skill, was photographing news.” His wife said he sometimes beat firefighters to a fire and they joked about checking him for matches.

February 10, 2023

Obituaries

Paul Hourigan
Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists? | The New Yorker

Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?
According to the lawyer behind a new class-action suit, every image that a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-ai-art-stealing-from-artists
According to the lawyer behind a new class-action suit, every image that a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

February 10, 2023

Copyright
Jeanine Michna-Bales and Adam Reynolds: Countdown – LENSCRATCH

Jeanine Michna-Bales and Adam Reynolds: Countdown – LENSCRATCH
For those of you who may remember the days when your elementary school teacher instructed you in the “Duck and Cover” air raid drill triggered by a lonely siren where you dove under your desk, covered your head with your arms and were instructed not to look out the windows of your classroom, the book,
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/02/countdown/
Michna-Bales takes us on a visual tour of decrepit fallout shelters, some public and others private, with shelves still stocked with unopened cans of foodstuffs and “survival crackers” from the 1960’s.

February 10, 2023

Portfolios & Galleries

Adam Reynolds, Jeanine Michna-Bales
Doc Filmmakers Reckon With the Industry’s Murky Ethics

The Documentary World’s Identity Crisis
The boom — or glut — in streaming documentaries has sparked a reckoning among filmmakers and their subjects.
via Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/article/tv-documentaries-ethical-standards.html
Documentary-making has never been ethically pure or entirely subjective. (“I’m working on a project that is the kind of documentary where you do six takes of the person putting a boat in the water to get the right one,” one editor told me.) Every shot and every cut is a choice, and even its practitioners have never agreed on whether the medium is closer to journalism or to cinema. One of the earliest popular documentaries, Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film, Nanook of the North, was about a man supposedly living in the Canadian tundra, untouched by the wider world — and it was full of lies. Nanook’s real name was Allakariallak. His wife in the film wasn’t his wife. (She was, according to another local, one of Flaherty’s multiple wives.) Allakariallak hunted with a gun, but that didn’t fit the story Flaherty wanted to tell, so the director asked him to use a harpoon. In defense of his methods, Flaherty said, “One often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit.”

February 10, 2023

Ethics, Film & TV
The Lost New Jersey Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson | The New Yorker

The Lost New Jersey Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Why New Jersey? Because people make such a funny face when you mention New Jersey.”
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-lost-new-jersey-photographs-of-henri-cartier-bresson
In 1975, the renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson received an invitation to travel from Paris to America for what would become one of his final photographic projects. Choose any subject, anywhere, he was told. His choice? New Jersey. New Jersey? He seemed delighted by his own provocation. “Why New Jersey?” he said. “Because people make such a funny face when you mention New Jersey.”

February 6, 2023

Portfolios & Galleries

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Will Warasila: Quicker Than Coal Ash – LENSCRATCH

Will Warasila: Quicker Than Coal Ash – LENSCRATCH
As the publishing and awards director/senior editor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, I first met Will Warasila when he was a graduate student in Duke’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFA|EDA) program (he graduated in May 2020) and immediately became acquainted with the energy, commitment, and intelligence that he brings
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/02/will-warasila-quicker-than-coal-ash/
Quicker than Coal Ash his is not only a compelling series of imaginative and artful photographs but also a reflection of Will’s deep engagement in long-term fieldwork, relationship-building, and advocacy work in Walnut Cove. He continues to be connected to the people he met there. Additionally, he did research into the science around coal ash, environmental law, and governmental policy making and collected oral histories. He also contributed materials from the project to grassroots organizers and to the legal team representing community groups who sued Duke Energy to excavate six coal ash sites in North Carolina (and won).

February 6, 2023

Portfolios & Galleries

Will Warasila
Joyce Dopkeen, Barrier-Breaking News Photographer, Dies at 80 – The New York Times

Joyce Dopkeen, Barrier-Breaking News Photographer, Dies at 80
In 1973, she was the first woman hired by The New York Times to be a full-time staff photographer.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/business/media/joyce-dopkeen-dead.html
Ms. Dopkeen roamed widely with her camera for The Times, whether capturing Muhammad Ali squaring off against Joe Frazier, female prison inmates training puppies to be service dogs, exuberant children enjoying summers in urban parks, or the aerialist Philippe Petit pausing during an eight-and-a-half minute tiptoe across the Great Falls gorge in Paterson, N.J., before 30,000 gaping spectators.

February 3, 2023

Obituaries

Joyce Dopkeen
Argus Paul Estabrook: Half Eye, Half I – LENSCRATCH

Argus Paul Estabrook: Half Eye, Half I – LENSCRATCH
I met Argus Paul Estabrook through a mutual friend in my last year of undergrad at Virginia Intermont College back in 1997 or 1998. We didn’t reconnect until the invention of social media when I became much more aware of his work. Back in 2021, I attended the opening of his exhibition at Emory &
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/01/argus-paul-estabrook/
I’m a Korean American, lens-based artist working in South Korea and the USA. I use candid moments and chance encounters to share a personal journey that often explores the intersections of identity, race, and politics. Artistically, I consider myself a street photographer that sometimes takes the camera inside to tell private stories. -Argus Paul Estabrook

January 31, 2023

Portfolios & Galleries

Argus Paul Estabrook
Advice for Portrait Photographers – Interview with Todd Hido | LensCulture

Advice for Portrait Photographers – Interview with Todd Hido | LensCulture
One of America’s leading photographers offers his insights about making great photographic portraits
via LensCulture: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/todd-hido-advice-for-portrait-photographers
Todd Hido is one of the most interesting artists using photography today. We asked if he would be willing to share some insights and advice for photographers who are interested in the photographic portrait. Here are the thoughts and images he shared with us.

January 31, 2023

Photography

Todd Hido
Richard Avedon’s Naked Murals | The New Yorker

Richard Avedon’s Naked Murals
A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum showcases the terrific physical presence of a trio of the photographer’s large-scale works.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/richard-avedons-overwhelming-murals
A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum showcases the terrific physical presence of a trio of the photographer’s large-scale works.

January 30, 2023

Photography

Richard Avedon